In recent years a shift in perspective has taken place in the historiography on women and gender. Instead of examining the effects of grand narratives on gender relations and the position of women, historians increasingly look at the broader consequences of changes in gender relations. In line with this shift, historians nowadays tend to focus on opportunities rather than the restrictions that women encountered in life. The volume Female agency in the urban economy clearly shows the strength of this approach. Using the concept of agency is not unproblematic. In the first place, one easily gets entangled in the longstanding debate on the opposition between agency versus structure, in which arguments cannot easily be reconciled, as Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach rightfully point out. A second problem of using the concept of agency in the economic history of women is that it easily leads to the (unjust) accusation that one ignores the vulnerability of women and assigns less-favoured women power, possibly even responsibility, they did not have.

Simonton and Montenach avoid these pitfalls by carefully discussing the concept they apply and by keeping an eye on the web of constraints that women encountered. They address agency as ‘a process and mosaic of changing opportunities’ whereby constraints and obstacles that women were confronted with are taken into account. Agency arose from the interactions in which women ‘accommodated, negotiated or manipulated social rules and gender roles’ (p. 5). They abandon the interpretation of agency as immutable in time and place, as, for example, is often implicitly done when agency is conceived as resistance to ‘oppressive power relations’ or male dominance (p. 4) but rather, apply it as a ‘dynamic’ and ‘relational’ concept. They thereby are able to show how gender together with other factors determined the ability of women to manage their own lives. Focusing on women as historical agents offers the opportunity to go beyond the trope of vulnerability that characterised the lives of so many women in the early modern economy and gives a more nuanced interpretation of their experiences that does justice to the variety of ways in which individuals and groups of women navigated everyday life. This leads to valuable insights.

The 12 chapters on the experiences of women in towns spread over Europe, including Denmark, Finland, Sweden, England, Scotland, The Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy, are divided into three parts. The contributions in the first section show how women claimed space in various parts of the urban economy – from retail trade to (less expectedly) the medical market. Part II deals with constraints and opportunities and shows how unmarried women operated in commercial towns, how women coped with constraints imposed by guilds and how guilds adapted their regulation to changing economies. The chapters in the last section discuss how women operated, communicated and claimed space in communities and kinship relations.

The division into three sections helps to get a grasp on the large variety of themes addressed; yet the various chapters cannot altogether be separated and the topics addressed allow for some interesting comparisons. First, it becomes clear that gender was not always the most important structuring principle. By problematising the concept of agency in relation to gender it becomes clear how gender intersected with other ‘identities’, and exercised influence on women's leeway alongside other factors such as marital or familial status, life cycle stage, social status, being ‘alien’, or religion. Another crucial theme is the importance of the disparity between legal norms and everyday practice. Economic opportunities were often restricted, yet women enlarged their freedom by using the contradictions and indecisions in early modern law, which was often nuanced, fluid and/or applied with flexibility. Women found room to manoeuvre, be it in the corporate structures of the very small town of Laufen, or in the much larger Cologne. They knew of legal loopholes and were able to claim their space in the food trade in Lyon by combining licit and illicit activities. Rules could also be adapted through the actions of women (and men), as becomes apparent in the case of the claims of women on urban land in Swedish towns (for which the arguments and rhetoric show some striking similarities with the way in which women defended their position in guilds). Guilds not so much excluded women from work, but rather tried to regulate their position. Focusing on practice besides formal regulations is thus mandatory. That this also may unveil unexpected mechanisms disadvantaging women is shown by Danielle Van den Heuvel. Careful scrutiny of the actual impact of guild control in the Dutch Republic in the supposedly open sector of retail trade reveals how seemingly gender-neutral regulations especially restricted the economic opportunities of women.

In the Afterword the editors point to the similarities of female agency in localities that are geographically so disparate and characterised by extreme variations in size. Women could be found almost everywhere in the urban economy. They developed their own economic cultures and strategies, acted as intermediaries and used their own social networks inventively. Through their agency, women contributed ‘to the shape and character of the towns themselves’ (p. 248). This is best illustrated in the contribution of Eleonora Canepari who shows how the ‘specificity of female agency’, with women migrating to Rome at an older age, was combined with the features of a city, leading to a labour market with ample employment for migrant women.

For this topic, one might also reverse the argument to probe how differences in female agency arose. Simonton shows how the expanding trading community in commercial towns led to increased opportunities especially for singletons. The relation between female agency and the specific character of the urban economy is a topic that deserves further exploration. The broad range of towns of varying size and economic orientation spread over Europe would have offered excellent opportunities. How did female agency relate to the local context, or vary according to economic structures that defined the specific character of towns? Can the ‘mosaic’ of opportunities used or created by women be related to a certain type of town? Is it possible to relate (differences in) agency to a typology of towns? These are questions that are left for future research, for which this volume forms an inspiring point of departure.